“[W]hen you live with a government run by The Liars’ Club, it can be a comfort to turn to poetry, since poets are only part-time liars.”
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Three Poems by Alessandra Narváez-Varela
When I sit on the toilet, my thighs,/ purple and mold-green, file against / each other, mercilessly. My neck hairs / rise, dandelion-like, aware of her thighs
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Beemoor Romance by John Hearn
The first thing she told me was that she works at Victoria Secret, which I took as a way of saying she’s very sexual, very accepting of all kinds of shenanigans. And that she’s good at sex. That’s how I took it. But at that time she was already pushing seventy or so and I found it hard to picture her liver-spotted hands and bony fingers holding up a black and pink corset, bringing it up to her slightly hunched frame to give a customer a sense of how it would hang, how it would look to the guy she was planning to have sex with next.
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Smallmouth by Justin Hocking
So many things fell into place after that dental exam. The twenty-seven previous years of painful shyness. My trouble pushing words through this tiny oral aperture. Everyone always asking me to speak up. The dentist helped me understand that my social anxiety has a physical component, right here on my face.
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Malus by Geoff Anderson
I find the last crabapple—rotted, not fallen
from the branch but buried up in the leaves.
What has stopped the cankered globe from falling?
By Any Other Name by Key K. Bird
When you were a teenager, you volunteered for an organization in the town where you grew up, a town so small most people called it by the name of the city beside it. The organization raised money for people living with HIV and AIDS. You’ve forgotten the name of the organization, but not the names of the people you met there. Michael. Terry. Anthony. Angel. Always men, even when their names were fluid.
Read MoreCurses by Berry Grass
TNS stands in solidarity with the trans community. As a show of support, we are proud to reprint and celebrate the work of Berry Grass.
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Learning How to be Female by Annie Lampman
As a child of the late 70s and early 80s, I was convinced that glossy “magazine women” were a distinct subspecies of human females who came out of the womb painted like colorful aliens, born complete with purple eyelids, black-lined eyes and thick-coated lashes, bright pink cheeks, and shiny-plump red lips. I studied them for hours, fascinated by their colorful flawlessness compared to the plain imperfection of “normal women.”
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immigrant treatise by Bernard Ferguson
the sun is retreating from yet another day that wishes to lay claim
over our bodies & my friends have taken to the streets in my name.
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Edge of a Piece of Cloth, Made Strong by Holly Willis
If I could I would sew for my sister a coat of soft leather. I would ply malleable pink hide for an effort so vital, but a gabardine twill is perhaps more practical. Gleaned from the coats of animals, culled from the cocoons of silkworms, scavenged from the seeds and leaves and stems of plants, remnants, vestiges, reckoning, reckoning.
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Clementine, My Darling (an almost-memoir) by Joanna Brichetto
It was the clementine that killed me. I peeled it for your lunchbox because you need Fruit to complement the Protein and the Crunchy, and because school lunch is so short and you get busy chatting and if I don't peel it for you and break it into segments, the whole thing comes back home in its BPA-free, nesting container (labeled with your name in silver Sharpie).
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On Becoming a Person of Color by Anne Liu Kellor
She is used to defining herself in the negative—not quite this or that; or as divided—only half or part. She is mixed, which means that she has never seen herself entirely as Chinese, nor entirely as white. As a teenager, her friends were mostly white, in a school that was mostly black and white, so she identified with the white kids. Her friends would eagerly ingest her mom’s Chinese leftovers after a night of partying (where she’d teach them how to say, We are going to drink a lot of beer tonight! in Mandarin); she was their fun Asian friend, different, yet rooted in the same pop culture, white culture.
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Neighbor by Virginia Marshall
Virginia Marshall is a writer and audio producer. Her work has been published in The Harvard Review, Brevity, Atlas Obscura, and has aired on NPR and WBUR.
What'll I Do by M. A. Vizsolyi
She thought she heard someone say her name—not loudly, but not loud enough that she could make out the melody of vowel sounds that comprised her name—Laura, it said—in a way that asked her to look quickly, as if there were something to see suddenly alighting just behind her on the shelf of the bookcase—but she didn’t see anything—and things like this happened to her once and a while, but not so much that she thought it odd.
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Two Poems by Robert Krut
And as the curtain above turns
to black with the absence of time,
we lie here, backs on grass,
dew climbing up and over our thighs.
Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir brilliantly blends author Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s own experiences with mental illness with research about the history of mental illness (and treatments) in the United States and interrogation of the gendered stigma surrounding mental health. I recently had the chance to talk with Montgomery about the process of writing and publishing the book—due out from Mad Creek Books this fall—as well as why we read and write creative nonfiction and the ways that nonlinearity and memory often go hand-in-hand.
An Interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Owning Our Experiences on the Page
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No One Here Named Me by Suzanne Roberts
At Burning Man, you’re supposed to resolve your issues with a Black Rock Ranger, someone who can come and negotiate problems on the playa, but I was beyond that. I wanted to call someone with handcuffs and a squad car, someone who could take him away. But would they? I didn’t know.
Read MoreTake your medicine by elizabeth zaleski, illustrations by kevin abt & chad miller
You know those old public service announcements about your brain on drugs?
The egg sizzling in the skillet. Your metaphorical brain--fried.
I think about those commercials a lot.
Two Poems by Jessica Guzman Alderman
Like all beasts wandering on the edges of cities, I turn my head
toward the highway. The sun sets across six lanes of idling engines.
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A Normal Interview
Ryan McDonald Talks with Steven Church
A Normal Interview: Conversation on The Spirit of Disruption
Featuring 28 writers, The Spirit of Disruption: Landmark Essays from the Normal School is an anthology containing an eclectic array of traditional and innovative creative nonfiction essays that were published in the Normal School during the ten years since its launching in 2007-2008. Over email, editor Steven Church spoke with me about it in-depth.
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